After an interesting morning at Motorcycle R&R in Midvale, I was left with a lingering question. Do I sort out the detonation, noise and heat problem in my R1150GS, or do I ditch it and move up to the lustworthy R1200GS?
Well to get all the problems sorted on the R1150GS is going to involve stripping the engine down and de-carbonising it, honing the cylinders and putting new piston rings in. $700 is steep, but not that much in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, I could trade-up to the newer bike, but that would cost me at least $5000 to do. Plus I'd lose the hard luggage and all the other bits I've done to my bike.

So in two weeks time, the Beemer is going in for some well-earned R&R. Hopefully when I get it back, it will be a transformed motor.

Holy snot. The first spacecraft to land on a celestial body other than the moon or mars. The Huygens probe landed on Titan today and spewed data for about 5 hours before the battery gave out.
ESA's Huygnes mission page.Amazing.
One of the descent images shows a network of channels and rivers emptying into a body of liquid. The sensors on Huygens deduced wind speed, atmospheric pressure and the conductivity of Titan's air during its descent. Methane clouds and hydrocarbon rain were also analyzed by an onboard gas chromatograph. A microphone listened for thunder.

Most of the websites have been hammered today. Space.com and spaceflightnow.com are hosting severely reduced page sets because their servers are being pummelled into submission by websurfers. The NASA and ESA sites are dead slow too.

My, my, so the US failed to capture Bin Laden and failed to find Weaponsofmassdistruction. And B*sh has gone public and told us he's stopping the search for more WMD because there likely aren't any. Oddly enough, this story has received almost no publicity today. It will be interesting to see how much publicity he gets when the massive pullout comes next month.

I seem to remember Osama Bin Laden, and WMD were once really important. Remember? Worth fighting a war over kind of important? But now not really that important at all. I guess that means B*sh can be impeached now does it? After all, he's admitted there were no WMD in Iraq. Which means he's admitted the core reason for going to war was a lie. Let's not forget that his lie has killed 1300+ of his countrymen and maimed over 100,000 others, not to mention the intolerable loss of life in Iraq itself.
If the "President" considers a middle-eastern war so insignificant that he feels comfortable lying about it, he should be impeached and brought to justice as a war criminal.

It is time now that the US and Britain apologize publicly to the world and compensate for the human and material loss to Iraq. The second thing they should do is pull the military out of Iraq and put the Army Corps of Engineers to work rebuilding the infrastructure. Let's not forget now that most of the country is still without water, power and phones, despite what the "President" tells us.

The US claims to be the leader of the moral high ground, they should now accept their faults as well and acknowledge that they were wrong. Impeaching Bush would be a great start. He took us all to war on a blatant lie.

All this talk from Delta about cheaper fares made me go and check expedia today for an arbitrary trip from Salt Lake City to Manchester and back. Obviously, the most expensive fare was British Airways, by a considerable margin (it always is). But the cheapest was BMI - British Midland. At last BMI have got in with expedia!
Delta were the second most expensive, at $100 more than it used to cost. Not quite sure how that works.

About the 1985 masterpiece film "Brazil":
However, it may be argued that the existence of 'terrorists' in the film (i.e., Jill Layton, Buttle/Tuttle, and Sam are all accused of being terrorists) and various 'terrorist' acts (i.e., the restaurant and shop bombing, the blown up car) are deliberately made ambiguous - it is very probable that the central threat of terrorism is the government's way to silence deviation, provoke fear, cover up its multiple errors, and provide a scapegoat enemy. Viewers must interpret this central theme of the film for themselves - and recognize the fact that ironically -- there may be no terrorists at all.

For some reason, I could not get to sleep last night. After lying awake until about 3:30 I got up and had to start pacing the room, doing anything to try to make myself tired. In the end I think I must have fallen asleep about 5:00 and the clock radio went off at 8:00. I can't think straight and can bearly keep my eyes open today.

Forcing naked Iraqi prisoners to pile themselves in human pyramids was not torture, because American cheerleaders do it every year, a court was told today. The retarded lawyer defending retarded Specialist Charles Graner, who is accused of being a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, argued that piling naked prisoners in pyramids was a valid form of prisoner control.

If the jury buys that explanation, then the jury are all retarded too.